Well, that's rather the question, isn't it? I guess at the very least I'd like to be able to write something that looks and feels like suroutine but is inlined into the code that "calls" it, thus avoiding the overhead of a real subroutine call:

Then I can beep() to my heart's content without killing my program with the subroutine overhead.

But that's just the start. Reading "On Lisp" made me realize that an expressive macro system can do more than just provide a fast, clean alternative to subroutine calls. How would this work in Perl, which is a lot more varied than Lisp? I'm not at all sure.

Hello. One of the Monastery's resident Common Lisp users here. I'd take that wager in a second. With the exception of certain things that Perl is explicitly optimized for (like regexes, string processing and such) I'd expect a quality Lisp (e.g. Lispworks, Allegro, CMUCL) to do much better. For example, I have considerable code doing numerical computations in Lisp, and it's typically not even worth rewriting it in (for example) C to attempt to get a speed improvement.

Now why would you just assume that? There are some really fantastic optimizing compilers for Lisp out there, not to mention veteran Lisp hackers with 20-odd years of experience making fast Lisp code...

That's like saying that mundane C will beat profiled Perl, which is just as false.

As I had noted in my post to Elian, I got the impression (mistaken or not) working with a platform that was written in Lisp written by Paul Graham and on some notes I've seen back and forth between him and Trevor Blackwell. I figured since Paul has for all intensive purposes wrote the book on Lisp, it is pretty optimized.

Now the benches that I saw were mainly IO based and it was a lot slower than Perl which was slower than C which was slower then ASM.

I could certainly be wrong but Lisp seems to bring with it a lot of inherent weight. Again, this is in my very limited experience with it. I don't doubt that Lisp is better suited for certain tasks. In fact my coding style has taken on a more Lisp-ish style in the past 6 months. (Though I would take Perl over Lisp anyday.)

[Your Mother]:They get almost everything wrong on every level. I think they create and restrict the market and fundamentally misunderstand audiences.

[Your Mother]:Consider how long, for example, superhero movies were kept at bay because they weren't commercially viable. They always were, just Hollywood couldn't see it or understand how to make one because there is no management talent in the town.

[LanX]:Erich von Strohheim built his career on beeing the most hated guy (The man you love to hate)

[Your Mother]:You see these amazing set, costumes, performances, etc, etc, etc all ruined by production and script decisions from the top down.